Muffins with Mommy

There were so many muffins with mommy pictures on my Facebook newsfeed this morning. It brings back such sweet, sweet memories.
Mother's Day 2010. We had known Tyrell for a matter of weeks. He had my whole heart from the beginning. His teacher emailed me the week before Mother's Day and said something along the lines of, "I know it's late notice, but there's this muffins for mommy breakfast on Friday if you want to come…" She could have told me it was the next day and I would have been there.
I remember we drove down to Tampa on Thursday afternoon and took Tyrell to dinner. And then on Friday morning I got up super early and had to be at Ty's school at some ungodly hour like 7 AM. I met him at his daycare, which was across the street from the school, and then we walked together to school. He pointed out his friends to me and told me about them. We got to the media center where the muffins for mommy event was, and Ty was so proud to have someone to bring with him. I was delighted to be his person.
We ate muffins from Mimi's café. We read some books. Ty was pretty indecisive about what we were going to read. Someone took a picture of us. I never got a copy. But I have this sweet, sweet memory.
After muffins for mommy, Tyrell's teacher said I could come with him to class and stay as long as I wanted. I didn't want to be too much of a distraction for him, so I stayed about 45 minutes. But when I left I gave him a hug and a kiss and said goodbye and asked him where he wanted to go to dinner that night. I'm sure he said CiCi's or McDonald's. That's pretty much always been his answer. But then when I went to leave he ran after me and asked me, "Where do you want to go to dinner?"
He's always been such a sweetie.

Parenting

Yesterday Ty was 35 minutes late coming home from fishing in a neighborhood pond. I was annoyed, but I tried to be calm instead of angry. So I said, "What do you think your consequence should be?" and he said, "No fishing for the rest of the week." and I said, "No fishing for the rest of the week." 

No voices were raised, no temper tantrums were had, no negativity. Just a choice and a meaningful consequence (because I had to stop him from going fishing by way of a neighbor's backyard at 8am the other morning...crazy about the fish, that one is).

I'm not known for being calm or making good decisions in the heat of the moment, necessarily. I try not to yell at my kids, but usually that just means I'm bottling up the yelling instead of making an altogether different and more productive choice. But this fishing consequence? My single shining moment this year. I'm not proud of it, I'm learning from it. A ton. 

Our kids are so much smarter than we give them credit for.